Serious game design: ‘These are my people’

When Heather Brown took her family hobby to school, the gaming world gained a talented coder intent on doing good.

She found her future in design in her high school’s Serious Video Games class, where projects focus on solving global problems, with an artificial intelligence edge provided by IBM Watson APIs.

Heather has contributed code to Medical Minecraft, a mod of the best-selling game that casts disease as the enemy. Now she’s designing a new game with an intricate interface where players interact with historical figures and use math to win. Her post-graduation goal: “I want to make the next generation of games not just entertaining, but inspirational.”